David Gerard wrote:
wine-users - http://forum.winehq.org/
It started as a mailing list, then the forum was set up with a two-way gateway. The forum is where most of the posters actually post from, but so far it works ... surprisingly well!
If you allow posting via email, then you lose the ability to properly authenticate those posts. If you allow receiving of the full content via email, then you lose the ability to postmoderate. Maybe it would be useful as a temporary migration measure, but it wouldn't solve any abuse problem until you removed those features.
The main thing Wine found is that the forum promptly had 10x the traffic!
There's a chance we would see that aspect of it. The mailing lists have a different readership to the on-wiki discussion pages, and that's because of the technical barrier, which works in both directions. Some people prefer the interoperable nature of mail and don't bother reading the wikis, and some people like web pages and find the mailing lists strange, and the subscription process onerous.
Because I know that this mailing list is mainly populated with the former kind of person, I know that my desire for a web-only interface is wishful thinking.
A properly advertised bidirectional gateway might go some distance towards healing the split in the community that we currently have. But then we would run the risk of losing the people who contribute via mail, on small screens or non-threading clients, who already complain that foundation-l traffic is getting too high. A lower barrier to entry, with a continuing lack of postmoderation, would only make the traffic higher.
I'm not opposed to bidirectional gateways, but I do think we should move carefully. If the software is not up to scratch, we could lose what productive public discussion we have, and increase our reliance on private mailing lists.
-- Tim Starling